This article provides a comprehensive examination of Albania’s religious coexistence from both socio-political and legal perspectives, highlighting how historical experiences, legal frameworks, and community practices collectively shape interfaith relations. Drawing on case studies from urban centers such as Tirana and Shkodra, as well as rural communities where traditional interfaith networks have persisted, the article explored how legal pluralism, allowing religious communities to manage personal matters like marriage, inheritance, and education, interact with grassroots social engagement to sustain harmony among Albania’s diverse religious groups. The article also analyzed institutional policies, including the role of the State Committee on Cults, municipal interfaith programs, and the Interreligious Council of Albania (IRCA), demonstrating how coordinated initiatives between government bodies and civil society promote dialogue, joint cultural events, and collaborative social projects. By tracing the historical trajectory from the Ottoman millet system through the challenges of the communist period to contemporary reforms, the article illustrates the resilience of interfaith tolerance in Albania. This experience provides a distinctive model of religious coexistence, offering valuable lessons for other pluralistic societies in the Balkans and beyond, emphasizing the importance of combining legal recognition, social cooperation, and community-led initiatives to foster enduring interfaith harmony.

The article aimed to analyze the profiles of older people who stayed in Polish prisons. The analysis was based on biographical interviews conducted in 2023 on a research group of 30 inmates staying in 12 prisons. Most of them were first-time prisoners, 10 were penitentiary recidivists. The beginning of the imprisonment sentence (during which the research was conducted) was at least when they were 60 years old. They were imprisoned for various crimes: most often against property, life and health, family and care, sexual freedom and decency. Although they shared some common experiences, such as growing up during the communist period, being retired (in most cases) and experiencing health and financial problems, the older inmates differed in many aspects.

The aim of this work is to synthesize some major aspects regarding the interference of the political sphere against the aesthetic one. of literature, during the period of communism in the Romanian cultural space, and not only, as demonstrated by the periodicals of the time. The "ideals of the age", set, however, were intended to influence the perception of the receiving mass, for indoctrination in the period addressed.

The ageing population problem is frequently raised in economic and social contexts. In architecture, there is also a need to look for new solutions to improve the quality of life of senior citizens. Fundamentally, the question of improving the accessibility of existing facilities, which, with time, no longer meet the needs of the residents, is fundamental. This article aims to present a proposal for revitalising the 'Superunit' in Katowice based on research into the quality of life of senior citizens in Poland. Based mainly on a qualitative research method to assess the quality of the existing space, as well as on the results of a survey with open-ended questions and in-depth interview on the living conditions of senior citizens in the Superunit, a quantitative and statistical research method to identify user groups and their numbers, based on population-wide statistical data collected using mixed methods by the Statistics Poland (GUS) and the Public Opinion Research Centre (CBOS). As a result, the project to revalue the building, transforming it into a vertical housing estate, is fully adapted to older people's needs and meets the requirements for new residential facilities and solves problems related to the quality of the building's construction and the limitations of the architecture of the communist period. The revitalisation concept helps prevent social exclusion and supports seniors in adapting to new life circumstances. It enhances their life satisfaction, encourages greater activity, and fosters stronger social connections, contributing to improved physical and mental health. The presented approach can be implemented in the revitalisation process of specific buildings and entire housing estates, as well as at the design stage of new investments that meet the needs of older people. This will help improve the housing situation by increasing the accessibility and usability of residential units, while also reducing the amount of raw materials used to produce building materials, which will positively impact their cost.

The aim of this paper is to summarize some major aspects regarding the interference of the political sphere with the aesthetic one identified in the literature belonging to the communist period as it is demonstrated by the periodicals of the time. Our interest is focused on the lat three issues of the journal „România liberă”.

Abstract The Sibiu Salami is a dry-cured raw meat product that has been recognized and appreciated by Romanian consumers since the communist period, when it was regarded as a luxury item. Today, Sibiu Salami stands as a symbol of traditional Romanian charcuterie production and as an example of a product that has withstood the test of time, successfully combining artisanal tradition with modern quality standards. The present article provides a concise overview of the history, technological process, and physical-chemical and sensory characteristics of Sibiu Salami PGI, produced by three Romanian manufacturers in compliance with the specifications required for obtaining the Protected Geographical Indication (PGI) designation.

This article presents the presentation of the deportation of Poles to the Soviet Union, including Kazakhstan, carried out in the years 1940 to 1941 in Polish history textbooks for secondary schools. The chronological framework of the study covers the years from the end of communist rule to the present. The issue of interest will be shown through selected examples. In the first part of the text, the author presented one of the most tragic events in the history of Poland in the 20th century, i.e. deportations of civilians from the eastern territories of the Second Polish Republic occupied by the USSR. They were part of the mechanism of extermination of the Second Polish Republic’s society by the Stalinist authorities.The author’s intention was to present the mechanism of falsification of history during the communist period and the process of restoration of memory after the change of political system. Some Polish history textbooks from the communist period mentioned deportations, but lacked information about the death toll, violence and destruction of the Polish nation. It was only stated that the number of Polish victims was 60 %, and that the local population in Kazakhstan, among other places, was friendly towards the displaced. Not even the Soviet occupation was written about. Among other things, the period of communist rule was characterised by strict censorship. The core curriculum was subordinated to the political line of the communist party. It was only after the change of the political system that it was possible to speak and write openly about Soviet crimes against Polish citizens. This information was included in the core curriculum for secondary school and appeared in all textbooks. The authors of the textbooks conveyed the knowledge about the Stalinist crimes against Polish citizens in various ways in more or less detail, usually to a limited extent. The focus was on the extermination of Polish officers by the Soviet NKVD — the Katyn Massacre

Published between 2003 and 2005, Nina Cassian’s diary is an important historical document, as it reflects the living and working conditions of writers during the communist period. Equally significant is the writer’s disillusionment, her youth having been marked by sincere adherence to the communist revolution. Despite this, even after the publication of her debut volume, Nina Cassian became a victim of ideological persecution and tried to conform to the requirements of socialist realism, albeit unsuccessfully. The inability to adapt, the incomprehension of the criticism she received, and her sharp gaze upon the world characterize the three volumes and shape a path of disillusionment. The first volume of memoirs has a unique structure, as it contains three layers of writing: the immediate recording of events, typical of a diary, followed by observations added during a first rereading in the 1970s, and a third layer, that of the final rereading and the authorial discourse freed from the self-censorship inherent in life under a totalitarian system, after 1985. That year, the author was in the United States on a Soros scholarship when she learned of the death of her friend Gheorghe Ursu. Frightened, she chose the path of exile, so the notes and additions made on American soil reflect the breaking of self-limitations caused by the preventive fear of possible searches – a fear with which all writers in totalitarian regimes lived and continue to live. Thus, the diary is both a valuable document of its time and an intricate, multifaceted textual mechanism. The two subsequent rereadings become journeys through time, while the act of remembering and completing the text constitutes a transgression of the limits imposed by self-censorship. The present moment, immediately recorded in the diary, intertwines with the present of rereading, from which the writer brings additions, clarifications, and later revelations prompted by other experiences. Finally, exile also implies the passage from one language to another, and Nina Cassian takes this step as well, choosing to write in the language of her adopted country, even though, in interviews, she consistently stated that her true homeland was and remains the Romanian language.

If the recognition of Gaspar’s work has crossed numerous geographical and linguistic borders, we cannot speak of the same success in Romania, where translations continue to be scarce, reception discreet, and the poet unknown. Ethnic and political factors have constituted a real obstacle to his recognition, and Gaspar’s assimilation, especially during the communist period, rather undertook the form of a dissimulation. Personal relationships based on common artistic and poetic affinities were the factors that mediated the transposition of Gaspar into Romanian, and at the time of the centenary it can be said that his reception in Romania has not yet taken place.

The article presents the issue of architecture of the second half of the 20th century in Poland, with particular emphasis on the sacred architecture of that period. These resources, associated in the collective consciousness with the gloomy period of communism in Poland, are not treated as valuable monuments of their era but are often subject to demolition, devastation and radical transformations. The sacred architecture of this period, created despite very unfavorable conditions, is treated in a slightly different way, being a testimony to the rebellion and determination of a significant part of society. Despite this, churches from the Polish People's Republic (PPR) period, not being treated as historic monuments, are often not preserved and renovated with respect for their original assumptions. Due to the increasing secularization of society, some buildings are currently too large in relation to current needs, which is why the problem of adapting some of these buildings for other purposes begins to arise. These adaptations should be carried out with respect for the basic function of the temple and the original architectural assumptions. The work presents examples of churches from the second half of the 20th century in the Archdiocese of Częstochowa that were subject to this type of intervention.

Paul Constantinescu (1909-1963) is one of the most prolific Romanian film music composers and probably the first author of such productions even before the establishment of communism in Romania, in the aftermath of the coup d’état on August 23, 1944. Although he was initially seen as a true star in Romanian music, who received awards and was praised by the specialized press and had his music scores published by Universal Edition in Vienna, Constantinescu had an extremely turbulent destiny in the local music scene, as he was stigmatized by all three dictatorships under which he lived: Iron Guard (Legionary Movement), Antonescu’s, and the communist one. This study analyses the music of the war documentary Romania in the Fight Against Bolshevism or The Holy War (1941) and the political context in which this cinematographic creation appeared, a film that was never broadcast during the communist period.

Urban aging is a generalized phenomenon in developed countries and Romania is no exception. Romanian cities, marked by alert urbanization during the communist period, against the background of forced industrialization policies, have rapidly joined the path of inevitable ageing in the post-1990. The territorial or hierarchical disparities that have emerged are based on connections with the specific evolution of demographic transition trends or with how society has adapted to the post-communist context (the transition to a market economy, integration into the European Union). This demographic process was favoured by the coincidence of three essential phenomena specific to this context: fertility decline, massive emigration and increased life expectancy. By using official data, processed from the perspective of both descriptive and multivariate statistics, this exploratory study points out the existence of distinct patterns of evolution, explainable by variables such as demographic size, geographical position, the existence of regional or local specificities, etc. The explanatory value of the variables tested to capture the context in which this process evolves in Romanian cities was validated, both from a general and from a regional or hierarchical perspective. The obtained results create a solid basis for deepening the studied process at the local level through case studies that can more accurately reveal how Romanian cities have adapted to the new social-economic context.

The introduction of a universal, egalitarian social security system was promoted by the USSR in all countries within its sphere of influence during the communist period. However, despite this rather uniform external pressure, communist countries followed different social policy routes in terms of timing and design. Bulgaria was one of the first Eastern European countries to introduce a uniform pension system within a short period of time. In this article, we argue that besides communist ideology and pressure from the USSR, pre-communist social policy legacies, national constellation of influential actors, and country-specific socioeconomic conditions during the communist era are crucial when explaining the concrete design and timing of pension reforms in communist states. Using the method of process tracing and based on archival and document research, we shed light on the two most important pension reforms targeting the rural population in communist Bulgaria. We show that the political and ideological developments in the Soviet Union in the 1960s and 1970s in combination with the demographic and economic problems of Bulgarian agriculture can explain the early establishment of a unified pension insurance system in Bulgaria.

Physical and mental aggression constantly inflicted on an individual at any age is associated with the concept of torture. Torture, in its inherent sense, refers to the physical suffering caused by repeated aggression. While from the 13th to the 17th century torture used to serve the church or the army, it was later adopted for private situations as deliberate suffering inflicted by one person on another. The deliberate infliction of physical or mental suffering on an individual, especially a child, extends far beyond the public sphere and may be explained by inhumane impulses that are either pathological or hereditary. Doina Ruști's novel, “Lizoanca at 11”, is a very good example in this sense. It follows the destiny of a child, wounded both by her parents and by Romanian society after the communist period; this child’s trauma is connected to those experienced by the other heroes. By repetitively returning to the age of 11, they relive their own unhealed wounds, affording us to talk about a rather serious problem: the persistence of trauma across generations and its social implications. Starting from the theoretical references offered by Caty Caruth, we intend to underline that trauma is not understood as a wound inflicted on the body, but on the mind. It is not an event that, like a wound, heals over time, but something that imposes itself, repeatedly, returning to the brutal event which provoked this trauma and maintaining it. Whether read for the first time or revisited, the story of the 11-year-old girl in Doina Ruști's best-known novel, continues to shock its readers. It is a story that transcends realism and naturalism, fitting into the genre of childhood trauma literature, a field that is attracting increasing attention from researchers today. Viewed through this lens, Doina Ruști's novel offers profound insights. The narrative is realistic, with vivid characters and a portrayal of poverty and lack of education intertwined with corruption, selfishness, and neglect. This creates an atmosphere that drives Eliza to run away from home and become a prostitute. The novel aims to present the characters' actions and behaviours from an external perspective, without delving into psychological interpretations or explanations. This objective, almost camera-like focus, gradually reveals the unfolding events, with the characters portrayed as neither entirely positive nor negative. The emphasis is placed entirely on the transformations in the child’s psyche, shaped by her interactions with a predominantly adult environment. This allows readers to trace the thought processes of the novel’s central female protagonist. In its third re-edition, the novel introduces a significant addition, concluding the previously 'indecisive' open ending with an epilogue where hope no longer has a place, and Lizoanca’s 'mute scream' fills every space.

The article aims to present how Vasile Romanciuc's poetry published until the 90s of the 20th century was perceived by literary critics. The whole approach follows, in diachrony, the critical discourses of some famous names from Bessarabia: Andrei Țurcanu, Mihail Dolgan, Ion Ciocanu, Alexandru Burlacu, Grigore Chiper, Eugen Lungu, etc., in order to highlight the way in which various critics interpreted the poet's creation and how the poet's volumes were perceived and evaluated in the two eras (totalitarian and post-totalitarian), emphasizing the fact that the critical discourse, like the literary one, was influenced by the censorship's ruthless eye, which is why the interpretation of texts was made, during the communist period, only within the limits allowed at that time. At the same time, we have tried to bring to the readers' attention poems that have not enjoyed the look of a critical eye, although they represented true gestures of courage in a society marked by ideological freezing.

From the first volume of stories, Fănuș Neagu writes about the disappearance of a picturesque world and customs, although sometimes barbaric, althoughhe does not want to show how a new world wins, the world of institutionalization, collective assimilated to factories, a world taken out of an ancestral flow, resettled in cities. Assimilated to Bucharest, where he feels at home, he always tends to escape to the Danube area in almost all the works he worte. The element of the psychology of creation preserve the authentic, although literature during its debut period was not favorable context, in the full communist period, the calendar of dogmatism still had enough unbroken pages. Fănuș Neagu’s literary creation continued to bear its own pressures, of a reality ofsubordinationto the political ideology of the time. The village, the factory and the history wouldbecome real sources of inspiration for Fănuș Neagu, making them true schemes of reality, even withthe risk of becoming dangerous once the limits imposed by the regime of the time were exceeded. Thedebut story ,,Snowing in Bărăgan”would foreshadow a departure from the canons of the era. TheRomanian epic creation places the rurald world exclusively under the horizon of social conflicts,exploited in the spirit of the political strategy of the time. In this context Fănuș Neagu brings theharsh reality of the times to the level of a literature worthy of study through real experiences, with themost interesting characters, delightful metaphors and topics that cover the entire context, preservingthe cultural and social memory reflected in the ever-living literature.

Abstract This paper examines the influence of American cultural models on Romanian poetry during the late communist period. Using a postcolonial framework, it highlights how and why Romanian poets in the 1980s navigated the symbolic presence of the United States, adopting Westernized perspectives through “self-colonization” strategies (Kiossev in Cultural aspects of the modernization process, 1995), integrating foreign cultural models to construct hybrid poetic identities. The concept of “in-between peripherality” (Tötösy de Zepetnek in The Comparatist 23:89–110, 1999) further clarifies how peripheral cultures negotiate their identities by integrating foreign cultural models and transforming them into “intentional communication” (Hebdige in Subculture. The meaning of style, 2002) and manifestos. Thus, Romanian poetry of the era becomes a site of cross-cultural engagement, constructing “cosmoscapes” that reflect the interplay of local and global imaginaries. By examining the works of poets like Traian T. Coşovei, Romulus Bucur, Alexandru Muşina and Mircea Cărtărescu, the study reveals how American cultural influences were adapted to fit local socio-political contexts.

After 1989 Poland decided to re-establish diplomatic relations to the State of Israel that were severed in 1967. Poland also opted for the dialogue between Poles and Jews that was very limited during communist period. Lech Wałęsa as President was keen on opening new contacts with the Jewish diaspora and Israel. Wałęsa visited Israel as first ever Polish President and Chaim Herzog visited Poland as well. In the 1990s key anniversary ceremonies were organized commemorating the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and the liberation of the Nazi German camp Auschwitz. In those years the issues of anti-Semitism and complexity of Polish-Jewish relations, particularly during the Holocaust, were addressed.

This article is a comparative case study depicting the trajectories of football and ice hockey development in Poland. It presents historical circumstances and national and local sports policies that contributed to the relatively high status and recognition of both disciplines in Poland, with the national teams holding significant positions on the international sports scene. This was achieved during the communist period thanks to massive state investments in sports and sports infrastructure. Special attention is paid to the institutional setting and its transformation in the post-communist period. Today, football is by far the most popular team sport in Poland, accounting for attendance, viewership, and public and private spending. On the other hand, ice hockey, highly popular until the early 1990s, has vanished from the sports landscape in many regions after decades of negligence and under-investment. Football, in contrast, is heavily supported by both state and local authorities as the most important sports discipline.

This paper tries to explain regional development in Eastern and Central Europe. A simple West European bias can lead to false interpretations of current spatial processes. The spatial structuring forces in the communist period created a divergent mosaic of regions with different prospects for future development. This differentiated 'spatial outcome' of communism should be taken as point of departure for the new, post-communist era. The interrelativeness of econornical, legal and political reforms after the break-down of communism should be kept in mind. Seven influence groups, on different levels of scale, should be distinguished to understand regional development: the political context, international organisations, macroeconomic reforms, foreign investors, local initiatives, regional policy and geographical location. Together with the inhcrited structures, this leads to a spatial differentiation which is different from the one prevailing in the communisl era.